Huxley vs Orwell via Postman
I just got turned on to this excellent cartoon by Stuart McMillen. It’s a comic strip retelling of/homage to Neil Postman’s work in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see
This brilliant quote is from the 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman. As media ecology expert, and Fordham professor Lance Strate eloquently explains on his blog, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see”, encapsulates Marshall McLuhan’s famous “medium is the message” adage, in that (rather than TV or newspapers, for example) children themselves are the medium we use to send messages. (Damn! - each time I read that quote I have to pause to think about it again, it’s so powerful.)
Unfortunately, online (and elsewhere), this quote is often erroneously attributed to a different writer. This blog post is part of an organized effort to correct the online search results to bring Postman to the top of the list, rather than this other writer, when someone types “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” into Google or some other search engine.
If you’re not familiar with Postman, and this quote has whetted your appetite for deep (yet accessible) insights and observations about how media affects us, you might as well start with Postman’s wikipedia page and take it from there. He wrote many books, though his most famous is Amusing Ourselves to Death (you know the book is good with a title like that!).
